Irish to share about father's WWII letters

The Saginaw Valley State University Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s next monthly meeting will be Wednesday, May 8, in the Curtiss Hall banquet rooms.

The schedule is as follows:

• 8:45 a.m.: Registration, socializing and continental breakfast

• 9:30 a.m.: Welcome, announcements and the program

The meeting is free for OLLI members and guests.

The program will be “A Thousand Letters Home: One WWII Soldier’s Story of War, Love and Life,” presented by Teresa Irish, author and speaker.

On May 26, 2006, one month and one day after her father’s death, Teresa Irish raised the lid on the Army trunk that had resided in the family home her entire life. There, nestled in row after row, were her dad’s nearly 1,000 handwritten letters from World War II. Carefully tucked away and visited only by him over the course of six decades, the letters were post-marked from November 1942 to December 1945. In the top left corner of each was the signature of the sender, Aarol W. “Bud” Irish. The fragile and yellowed pages were addressed to Bud’s parents and the sweetheart who would later become his wife, Elaine Marie Corbat.

Irish will share about Bud’s lonesome, moonlit nights listening to the Hit Parade, and the foxholes and front lines in Germany where he would receive the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. She will also share her father’s correspondence from the heartbroken mothers whose sons died by his side.

Irish began working on a book which captured the story of the letters in late 2006. As she wrote the book over the next five years, she struggled with an immense sense of regret about how little she really knew or understood about his war experiences.